I wrote it, as I have said, with pleasure; well satisfied should I be that any of my readers might peruse it with as much. It was planned and executed in a quiet little cottage in the Gulf of Spezia, something more than six years ago. I am again in the same happy spot; and, as I turn over the pages, not altogether lost to some of the enjoyment they once afforded me in the writing, and even more than before anxious that I should not be alone in that sentiment.
It is in vain, however, for an author to bespeak favor for that which comes not recommended by merits of its own; and if Kenny Dodd finds no acceptance with you on his own account, it is hopeless to expect that he will be served by the introduction of so partial a friend as
Your devoted servant,
CHARLES LEVER.
Marola, Gulf of Spezia,
October 1,1859.
A WORD FROM THE EDITOR.
The Editor of the Dodd Correspondence may possibly be expected to give the Public some information as to the manner by which these Letters came into his possession, and the reasons which led him to publish them. Happily he can do both without any breach of honorable confidence. The circumstances were these:—
Mr. Dodd, on his returning to Ireland, passed through the little watering-place of Spezzia, where the Editor was then sojourning. They met accidentally, formed acquaintanceship, and then intimacy. Amongst the many topics of conversation between them, the Continent and its habits occupied a very wide space. Mr. D. had lived little abroad; the Editor had passed half of a life there. Their views and judgment were, as might be surmised, not always alike; and if novelty had occasionally misled one, time and habit had not less powerfully blunted the perceptions of the other. The old resident discovered, to his astonishment, that the very opinions which he smiled at from his friend, had been once his own; that he had himself incurred some of the mistakes, and fallen into many of the blunders, which he now ridiculed, and that, so far from the Dodd Family being the exception, they were in reality no very unfair samples of a large class of our travelling countrymen. They had come abroad with crude and absurd notions of what awaited them on the Continent. They dreamed of economy, refinement, universal politeness, and a profound esteem for England from all foreigners. They fancied that the advantages of foreign travel were to be obtained without cost or labor; that locomotion could educate, sight-seeing cultivate them; that in the capacity of British subjects every society should be open to them, and that, in fact, it was enough to emerge from home obscurity to become at once recognized in the fashionable circles of any Continental city.